Mascha’s Cornerhttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl
Learning to be a happy, healthy and productive lifelong learnerWed, 26 Jul 2017 21:31:11 +0000enhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2A memorable Facebook challengehttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/09/memorable-facebook-challenge/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/09/memorable-facebook-challenge/#respondSat, 03 Sep 2016 09:20:53 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13584Over a week ago, I participated in a memorable Facebook challenge to write a good text for a sales page. We were all in a Closed Facebook group, working out loud, sharing our work and giving and receiving feedback on each others work. People were very honest and many of them went ‘all in’ to share their work and comment to others. They were giving honest feedback, new ideas, commented on writing style etc. It was very educational.

A difficult challenge with active participation and moderation

Actually I’ve never seen such a group before where so many people were very committed to get to the end all together. And it really wasn’t an easy challenge. It was actually quite a lot of work. Step by step we created a sales page, starting with a profile of our ideal client, writing down characteristics and results of our product, creating a product title, a header and sub header for the sales page, and then writing the different parts of the text on the sales page (recognizable problems, results, characteristics and the closing part with the call to action).
I don’t even have to look back at anything we did while writing this down. It’s all top of mind. That is the impact of such a challenge and going all-in.

The large participation can probably partly be attributed to the fact that it was very well timed: at the end of the holidays when most people are back from their vacation, full of energy but not really started on new assignments yet (since we were all entrepreneurs), so it seemed like there were many people who could put in a few extra hours and give a lot of feedback to the work of others.

But in my opinion, there was also a very positive influence of the moderator. She commented on almost every piece of work that was shared and kept participating in the discussions in the comments. It will probably have costed her many hours, but I think it made a big difference.

Comparing two challenges

In comparison: In the same week I also participated in another challenge (about improving my LinkedIn-profile) but these assignments were much easier and the moderator wasn’t participating as actively as the moderator in the sales page challenge. The moderator of the LinkedIn challenge said there were over a thousand people in the challenge, but it really didn’t feel like there were more participants than in the sales page challenge (about 70).

Remarkable: Even the LinkedIn challenge was executed in a Facebook group instead of a LinkedIn group. After asking about it I learnt that update notifications for LinkedIn groups are much slower than in Facebook groups. I never thought about that, but I think it’s true. On Facebook you get immediately notified when someone posts something in the group, or comments or likes it, which certainly helps participation.

Results

The sales page challenge was very valuable and I don’t regret spending more time in it than I planned. It helped me and many others set some very significant steps about writing their salespage and though most people didn’t really get to the final version, many of them will be about 90% done after this challenge and have a great template for their future sales pages.

Besides the template, the feedback that I got was also very valuable, and very clear: My sentences were too long and complex and I was writing too technical and theoretically and should approach my customer at an easier level, using more of their own words and experiences. Now that’s something I can work with.

My sales page is not finished yet, because I wrote it for a high-end product, while the challenge wasn’t exactly meant for that. Somehow I missed that clue in the beginning, but I found out during the challenge. And although I could have still changed at that moment and write a page for a different product, I decided to stick with my high-end product, because I really wanted to get something done about it. I don’t regret making this choice.

Next steps

So now I have to find out what other elements a sales page for a high-end product needs and add these to the text that I already have now. But I still feel as if I’m about 85% done and that’s a huge win. Along with all the great people that I met during the challenge which got me some very interesting new contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

What’s your experience with these challenges? Have you ever participated heavily in a Facebook challenge (or just a Facebook group) and what did you get out of it? Can you tell what made you want to participate more in that challenge than in other groups or challenges?

Looking forward to your insights!

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/09/memorable-facebook-challenge/feed/0Making more sensehttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/08/making-more-sense/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/08/making-more-sense/#commentsThu, 04 Aug 2016 14:28:10 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13577Continue Reading →]]>The PKM-course that I’m participating in at the moment really got me to think about the way I make sense of the things I read and listen to. This was also one of my purposes for participating, so I’m glad that the plan is working

In my previous post I wrote about improving my sense making habits by restructuring Evernote and redefining my workflow for blog ideas. This still works great, though in the meantime I added something very relevant to this.

If I find a valuable article, I save it to Evernote and read it there. I do this because in Evernote I can immediately highlight the parts of the text that are most important to me and I create a small ‘summary’ at the top of the article. This is what I was already doing for a few months now.

What I added since last week, is that if I find something really insightful in an article, I put this (preferably) in my own words in another Evernote note, called ‘Important insights’. Of course, I also copy the link to the note with the full article and paste it above the insight, together with the author’s name and the date of the article. At this moment I think that maybe I should also add the date of my own insight, because I could also have insights about articles, books or podcasts that are a few years old.

I don’t know yet exactly what the long term solution will look like for collecting these insights. Maybe with one note per month, or one note per insight? Probably the first option, because I like it to read them in one flow, so they start to make more sense. Though by collecting them individually, I can add tags to each insight which might also be very useful. And I can always copy them later into one note or merge them, or maybe even let IFTTT do the work

Other ideas are welcome of course! Where do you keep your insights? Do you collect them together or separately (where, how?)

A final thought about this for this moment: Yes, of course it takes more time to write the insights, but I think that these written insights are the best reflection of my own knowledge at that point in time. It’s not the summary of the article. The summary are the author’s insights. These are mine and if I don’t ‘grab’ these, they will soon become ‘obvious’ thoughts for me, and disappear into my ‘background thinking’. And that has already happend too many times before.

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/08/making-more-sense/feed/4PKM-workshop: Sense makinghttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/pkm-course-sense-making/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/pkm-course-sense-making/#commentsFri, 22 Jul 2016 14:06:20 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13564Continue Reading →]]>One of the assignments of the PKM-workshop that I’m currently participating in, got me to think quite long about my approach to it, which resulted in some Evernote-cleaning and a new blog post on my business blog about social bookmarking.

New tool for sense making?

My fist response was NOT to pick a new tool because I’ve already been trying so many tools and I know that ‘the tool is not the answer’. But then I saw Workflowy in Jane Hart’s list of notetaking and PIM tools which was a tool that I had never given a serious chance until now and so I decided to start using it for outlining my blog posts. I thought that would be useful, because writing blog posts for my business blog (in Dutch) just takes up way too much of my time. I thought that creating an outline in Workflowy might help me to them write faster. But when I started doing that, it just felt wrong to use an extra tool, while I can also create these outlines in Evernote (which I already use for many things).

Workflow redesign

So I decided to redesign my ‘blog idea’-workflow in Evernote and to clean up the big mess of blog ideas for business blog posts that I had in Evernote: I had notes with lists of ideas, notes tagged as ‘blog idea’, saved articles tagged as ‘blog idea’, and other notes for blog ideas gathered in my ‘Blogs to write’-notebook.

So now my ‘sense making’ process for writing my business blog is back on track:

When I have an idea I create a note in my Inbox-notebook in Evernote. If I have enough time at that moment, I note down my first ideas for an outline and then I save the note in my ‘Blogs to write’ notebook tagged as ‘outline’ and the category of my blog post.

If I don’t have the time or energy to create an outline, I just tag it as ‘blog idea’ and leave it in my Inbox-notebook, until I clean my inbox later that day. Then, when I clean my inbox, I write down some ideas for an outline in the note, tag the note with the ‘outline’ tag and move it to the ‘Blogs to write’-notebook.

For each blog category, I will keep a list of blog ideas that are either already published (in this case I see a blue link that leads to the published article) or still needs to be written (in that case I see a green link that leads to note with the post outline in Evernote).

Following these rules, I was able to clean up Evernote a bit and now I have a list of blog ideas for each blog category (even one for this blog!) which will hopefully make it easier to write the blog posts in the future.

Other tools for Sense making

I use Evernote for most of my ‘Sense making’. Not only for storing blog ideas, but also for storing articles, storing my own thoughts, writing drafts of articles and even this post is first drafted in Evernote. I do this because if I can’t finish it at this moment, I know that it will still be there in Evernote by tomorrow. I can also link notes to eachother and tag them with multiple tags.

Besides Evernote, I also use:

Diigo

Although I could store all my bookmarks also in Evernote, I just can’t seem to give up using Diigo. It’s a social bookmarking tool where I can store articles to read later, highlight texts, add comments, and very easily share these all with others.
I love to use a tool for the things it was meant to be. So Evernote is for notes, and Diigo is for bookmarks.
It’s just that some time ago I decided to keep my articles in Evernote and use Diigo only for bookmarking webpages and portals. I did this because Evernote’s search function is so extremely good that I wanted to be able to include saved articles in these searches. But as a consequence I didn’t use Diigo very much anymore and I stopped sharing valuable articles (I don’t share much from Evernote, although it is very well possible).
So this week I decided that I will start using Diigo again, also for sharing articles.

WordPress

It’s very easy to build blogs with WordPress and I use it for my personal blog (this one) as well as for my business blog. I recently started blogging again on my personal blog, which you are reading now. This time in English, so I can share it with more people. It is really meant for sense-making. Writing articles for this blog doesn’t take me very much time.As I mentioned above, I also have a business blog. I use that blog most of the time to explain things to others. Writing these posts take a lot of time. Of course I’m also learning from writing these blog posts, but that’s not the real purpose of that blog.

MindMeister

I use MindMeister if I find the need to create a mindmap. MindMeister works really smoothly and you can create three mindmaps in a free account. Recently I took a paid account, but for years I worked with two free accounts and whenever I want to create an extra mindmap, I exported one of the three mindmaps to my hard drive so I could delete it from the account and then I had ‘space’ again for a new mindmap. Worked like a charm Though recently I needed some other export facilities which is why I decided to get a paid account.

Flipboard, Scoop.it and ZEEF

I also use Flipboard, Scoop.it and ZEEF, but I’m never really sure wether to categorize these as Sense-making tools or as tools for Sharing (or even just for Searching!). For ZEEF it’s necessary to think carefully about the categorization of links on your ZEEF-page, which comes pretty close to sense making for me. But on Flipboard and Scoop.it, I only have to think about the category that I want to share the link in. And although it’s optional to add an ‘insight’ to the link, I can share a link via Flipboard or Scoop.it, without thinking very deeply about it.

Conclusion

So, my conclusion for this assignment is that new tools won’t always do the trick. I tried to add a new tool to my workflow, but it just wasn’t the right solution. But it put me on the right track. Because, what I did need, was to redesign my workflow for blog ideas. And when I knew that new workflow, it also enabled me to better structure and tag my blog ideas in Evernote. Things had gotten quite messy in there.

But I think that’s a bit inherent to the process. Sense making is ‘messy’, and you need the the space (the tools and the workflow) to create that mess and then make sense of it again. And then clean up the mess again so you can start over

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/pkm-course-sense-making/feed/5Personal Knowledge Management: Filtering informationhttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/personal-knowledge-management-filtering-information/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/personal-knowledge-management-filtering-information/#respondSun, 10 Jul 2016 13:55:25 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13551Continue Reading →]]>Another assignment of the 60 days PKM-course that I currently participate in, is to create filters and streamline the channels with incoming information.

I use several incoming streams, like Twitter and RSS-feeds. I created several Twitter lists to categorize the people and the companies that I follow, because I thought that reading by subject would make it easier to read more tweets. I created a column for each list in Hootsuite and I read these mainly on my smartphone.

With Inoreader, I follow many RSS-feeds from interesting blogs. I categorized these blogs, but I find that I need more categories. I read these on my laptop. I prefer Inoreader before Feedly for two reasons:

I can easily load the entire article when only an abstract is provided in the RSS-feed.

Also, the free version has a function to export an article to Evernote.

I use Evernote to store EVERY article that I like. I even use Evernote as a ‘read later’-tool (and don’t use Pocket or Instapaper), because:

I can highlight parts of the texts in Evernote while I’m reading the article.

I can immediately add a short summary to the note in Evernote that holds the article.

It is immediately at the right storage place to serve as input for many other things, like a blog post, a resource that I’d like to share in my newsletter, or a project that I’m working on.

I also like Diigo for saving, highlighting and commenting articles, but I decided to keep my articles all in Evernote, because then I have everything in one place. And even if I haven’t read the article yet, it might already come up in a search that I do for the subject that the article is about.

Some problems that I encounter in this process are:

There is a lot of double info. When I follow someone’s blog and tweets, I sometimes see a blog post already via Twitter, and then see it again later via RSS in Inoreader. But I will keep following them on Twitter, because otherwise I’ll miss the other thoughts and articles that they share.

There is just not enough time to read everything that I find interesting. I can’t read every tweet from my entire timeline on Twitter (not even after I broke it down into lists) and it’s very hard to keep up with every RSS-feed. And meanwhile, my reading list in Evernote just keeps growing.

Especially the last problem is hard to solve. It means I will have to take more time to read these articles and/or I have to make a better selection of articles that I save in Evernote to read later.

This again emphasizes the importance of constantly evaluating and improving my filters and creating better routines, which I hope to learn more about in this course.

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/personal-knowledge-management-filtering-information/feed/0Working out loud: The first week of my 12 week yearhttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/working-loud-week-12-week-year/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/working-loud-week-12-week-year/#respondFri, 08 Jul 2016 11:45:39 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13547Continue Reading →]]>This is the second week of the 60 days PKM-course of Harold Jarche that I participate in and one of the assignments is to ‘work out loud’: “describing what you are doing, what you are going to do, what you have done, and any problems you are encountering.”

I see some people online, doing this just so easily (at least it seems that way) and I really see value in this. It is one of the reasons why I participated in this course.

So, what am I doing these days?

12 Week Year

I just started my first 12 week year, which is a 12 week plan around a few very important goals, which are brought down to weekly action plans and daily action plans.

I found out that I planned WAY TOO MANY tasks of my 12 week plan in this first week.
This happened for two reasons:

Usually the number would have been ok, but this week I had to spend much more time on other ‘urgent and important’ tasks, just because I procrastinated on them in the previous weeks. But this week they became urgent and then they usually get done (if they are important enough).This is also one reason why I think the 12 week year could work for me. When I set goals at the beginning of the year, I think I have the whole year to get to these goals. With a 12 week plan, I have to do them in just 12 weeks. (Maybe I have to think about a 12 days year … )

A few tasks were not broken down into small enough pieces. If I’d had broken them down into smaller tasks I would have known that I would never be able to do them all this week.

Both remarks are important for future planning:

I have to take into account what other things I have to do that cannot be shifted to next week.

I should describe really actionable tasks instead of small projects. Breaking down tasks into smaller pieces will help me do them more easily too.

Working out loud

So, how did this first attempt of ‘Working out loud’ go? I think I’m experiencing quite the same as other participants and participants from previous versions of the PKM-course:

By writing things down, explaining them and sharing them with others, I got more clarity. I even created two clear actions for my next planning session.

One topic at a time

One important thing to take into account is that I should just pick one of the things that I did and really try to create a learning point from that. Working out loud might soon become a long story where I just ramble on about all the things that I encountered. This will not only be a very poor read for others, but it will also prevent me from having real clarity about one topic.

By picking just one topic now I could define some goog action points that might also work for others.

If I really want to discuss other topics too, I should probably do that in a different blog post, which can of course be posted that very same day

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/07/working-loud-week-12-week-year/feed/0Being ‘Interested’ versus being ‘Committed’http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/being-interested-versus-being-committed/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/being-interested-versus-being-committed/#respondThu, 30 Jun 2016 21:55:58 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13538At the moment I’m reading ‘The 12 week year‘ from Bryan P. Moran and in preparation for the planning the first 12 weeks it discusses a very interesting principle: Being interested versus being committed. Immediately when I read the headline of the chapter I was hit by it’s meaning. It’s about going in with both feet. Not tiptoeing or watching at the sidelines.

I know I can be very strong when I’m committed. I’ve experienced this already several times. For example when I wanted to run a half marathon for the second time. The first one I ran in 2007. This was within one year after I started running. But it took me more than 7 years to run the next one.

Seven years of struggling with various injuries and I think that actually no one around me still believed that I would run one again. But I knew I would.

Failing again and again

Each time that I prepared for my next one (which was about twice a year) I came very close, but just because of bad luck or wrong choices I failed again and again. But because I knew that these mistakes could be prevented, I kept on trying.

I tried everything: running in a group, running by myself, different schedules, stretching a schedule over more weeks to build up slower, doing extra exercises to get stronger calve muscles, or stronger muscles at the back of my legs, or a stronger body-core, wearing long pressure socks that kept pressure on the blood vanes of my lower legs, wearing flatter shoes, laying with my legs high against the wall before a run to get more fluids out of my legs, getting advice from a physical therapists, getting advice from a podotherapists. You name it, I tried it.

Finally: success

In October 2014 I finally succeeded. Not as fast as the first time, but also not as slow as I expected. Why did I succeed in the end? It was the experience and reflections that came out of all these actions and failures. It was the sum of it all. Knowing what my body needs, likes, doesn’t like, can handle, can’t handle, taking enough rest, doing a hard training when possible, but changing it to something easier when necessary or even skipping a training some times. Getting the right shoes, doing the right exercises, keep trying new things, being patient and pushing through. It was the commitment that made me keep trying again and again, learning enough in the process to finally succeed.

The same story with productivity

I experience the same level of commitment to implementing the productivity method ‘Getting things done’. From the first moment that I read about it, I was sure that this was by far the best and most complete method to get better organized, and to make better choices about my priorities. But, as with running, a method can be implemented in many ways and it needs to be adapted to the person and the circumstances. Besides, there are so many interesting but distracting subjects related to productivity, that can keep you very busy without being productive at all. Trying all the new tools, new ways of organizing, and different note taking techniques. But because of the strong commitment that I feel, I know that I will succeed in the end.

And now for my business

For my business I experience the same level of commitment. Again, people are (at the least) sceptical about whether I will succeed, but somewhere deep down inside, I feel that it’s possible. I’m not a born entrepreneur, but I wasn’t a born runner either and certainly not a born productive worker. I learn, I try, I fail, I reflect, I learn, I change and I try again. And slowly but surely I will get there.

Based on this commitment I will start my first 12 weeks, by using the framework from the book ‘The 12 week year’. I know I need deadlines. It’s like a training schedule for my next half marathon. I will do the work. I know I will.

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/being-interested-versus-being-committed/feed/0Follow you, follow mehttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/follow-you-follow/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/follow-you-follow/#respondMon, 06 Jun 2016 09:24:19 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13523Lately I’ve been reading a lot about internet marketing and at a certain moment my attention was drawn to an article called ‘The marketing secret about Twitter that most people don’t know’. Being curious and always willing to learn new things, I clicked on the link. Though I was deeply disappointed when I read about ‘the secret’:

“The power of Twitter is that you can ‘pull’ people to follow you on Twitter by following them (…) there is an unknown secret Twitter rule or ‘etiquette’ that most newbies don’t understand and that is when you follow someone that a certain percentage will follow you back”

Pfff… what a terrible piece of advice. And there were even people who commented with ‘Great tips!’, ‘Brilliant!’ and things like that. It’s shocking that there were only three comments mentioning that this is an inappropriate and unwanted way to get followers. One of them called it ‘lazy’.

I’d even go one step further.

I’d say that if you apply this tactic, you don’t understand anything about Twitter and you certainly don’t respect it’s dynamics. If someone follows me, I look at their profile and at their tweets and decide based on that if I want to follow this person. If I don’t like what I see, I don’t follow them back. I can not think of ANY reason why I’d want to see their tweets in my timeline.

So, how proud should I be on a follower who just follows me because I followed him or her? Will they read my articles if they aren’t interested in productivity or learning? Will they be involved in discussions around these topics or other ones that I’m interested in?

I hope people follow me because they like what I write about and who find my tips useful.

]]>http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/06/follow-you-follow/feed/0Becoming a social learnerhttp://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/02/becoming-a-social-learner/
http://www.maschavandeweer.nl/2016/02/becoming-a-social-learner/#respondFri, 26 Feb 2016 08:59:00 +0000http://mascha.vandeweer.nl/?p=13495I’m a lifelong learner. I love to learn. I’m always looking for new information, new insights, tools and techniques and I often reflect on what I do, because I want to keep improving.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about social learning, and learning and working out loud. I’m convinced that it is the right way to go, connecting with experts online, asking questions, telling what I’m doing and collaborating with others to solve problems and find new answers.

But I noticed that I find it hard to do this myself. It’s hard to tell what I’m thinking about when I’m not done thinking yet. But I know I’m never done thinking, so it is such a waste to not write down anything during the process.

Should I be doing that thinking online? I don’t know. I see others do this successfully, so I don’t know why I shouldn’t. Maybe it forces me to think in a more structured way and to come up with something worthwile in every post. Maybe it will make me feel more comfortable just by doing this more often. We’ll see.

Yesterday I heard someone quote Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results”. Well, so let’s try something different now. Let’s write from a learner perspective instead of from a teacher perspective, which I was used to. And let’s do it in English, which is not my native language. I’ve noticed that I can write more personally when I write in English. Maybe it will also make it easier to connect with more people globally.

Oh and any comments on my English are very welcome, because of course I want to get better at that too